‘Patriots Day’ Disconnect Between Bostonians and the Rest of Us

BOSTON — Let me say up front, I am not a native Bostonian. I pronounce my “Rs,” have not gotten used to snow that doesn’t melt until July and am not inclined to shell out for a pair of Tom Brady infrared pajamas.

But when two bombs exploded at the marathon finish line in 2013, killing three people and wounding 264 others, we were all Bostonians.

As the New England bureau chief for The New York Times, I covered that terrible week of the bombing and manhunt for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and endured the grueling trial in 2015, watching in awe as survivors hobbled to the witness stand. Not many of us in the press section were able to hold back tears.

Now the inevitable movies are starting to appear. A much-acclaimed HBO documentary that focused on the survivors aired in November. The film “Stronger,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs in the blast, is due later this year. And “Patriots Day,” which follows the bombing and investigation through a fictionalized cop played by Mark Wahlberg, opened here and a few other cities in December. It goes nationwide this weekend.

I asked Peter Berg, the director of “Patriots Day,” what he thought accounted for the disconnect between critics at home and audiences farther away. He said some people here had made up their minds in advance not to like the movie, possibly because they felt it was being made “too soon,” or were too close to the actual events.

He did allow that some people might simply have thought the movie wasn’t very good, but his bottom line was: “These are people who were probably going to write a bad review before they ever saw it.”

Well, maybe. But what I’ve found is that moviegoers outside New England pretty much accept the film on its own terms, as entertainment, and Bostonians do not.

The biggest point of divergence concerns Tommy Saunders, the character played by Mr. Wahlberg, a Boston native. People elsewhere have not really questioned why this composite character is guiding them through the mayhem. They may even appreciate him as a narrative device.

But the hometown crowd is a tougher sell. They know the real events and people in granular detail. Some are offended that Saunders is both made up and, implausibly, present at every key development. As the critic Ty Burr wrote in The Boston Globe: “We don’t really want to see people who weren’t there. Especially when they’re everywhere.” The focus on the Wahlberg character flies in the face of what happened that week, when the entire city — not just one guy — rose to the occasion.

Viewers might find themselves wondering about a few other aspects of the movie. So I asked Mr. Berg about some things that Bostonians especially are likely to notice — for better or worse.

CHEETAH ROBOT Sean Collier, a charismatic Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer killed by the bombers, is shown making a security check of classrooms and labs. Mr. Berg said he decided to convey Mr. Collier’s appeal by showing him flirting with a pretty female student, although a romantic relationship did not actually exist. But I was fascinated to see what was inside the lab: a famous M.I.T. invention, a four-legged robotic cheetah that learned to run and jump hurdles. Mr. Berg said that M.I.T. gave him rare access to the robot as a way of honoring Mr. Collier.

TRANSIT The movie shows the bombers driving to the marathon. But it was never publicly explained how they got there and returned to their apartment in Cambridge so quickly, considering the Marathon Monday street closures. Mr. Berg said he assumed that they drove, partly because surveillance video outside a Whole Foods in Cambridge showed their car shortly after the bombing.

THE WRONG MILK At the trial, the prosecution showed surveillance tape of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev buying milk at Whole Foods just 23 minutes after the bombing — and then, oddly, returning a short time later to exchange it. The point was to show Mr. Tsarnaev so unrepentant that after the bombing, he could do something as ordinary as buy milk. But we never learned why he exchanged it. The movie posits that Katherine Russell, his sister-in-law, had asked him to pick up whole milk for her toddler but that he mistakenly bought 2 percent. Mr. Berg said that’s the only reason he could think of for why she might have forced him to go back.

SALUTING MARTIN In the movie, a lone state trooper stands guard over the sheet-covered body of Martin Richard, the 8-year-old killed in the bombing. It was actually Boston police officers who stood watch while forensics units sifted the scene for evidence. Was showing a trooper just an innocent mistake? Mr. Berg said that the film was dedicated “to all law enforcement” and that “we tried to spread the wealth around to each of the different departments without being overly concerned about which department did what.” Martin is never named at the request of his family, which declined to participate in the movie.

GPS A big break comes when Dun Meng recites the GPS tracking number of his S.U.V., which the bombers have stolen. This actually happened. Without that number, the cops may never have found the bombers, who were heading to New York to blow up Times Square. Mr. Meng has said in interviews that the portrayal of his time with the bombers was totally accurate, down to Dzhokhar’s asking whether the car had a jack so he could play his music. The episode was filmed at a different Shell station, not the one where it happened, but the carjacking and Mr. Meng’s escape are riveting, especially because we never saw this on the news.

WATERTOWN SHOOTOUT The movie has been criticized here for overdramatizing the shootout. But this scene does capture something very real — when word went out that the bombers were in Watertown, more than 2,500 law enforcement officers from across the region converged on the suburb. Hundreds of them “self-deployed.” Mr. Berg said that the female cop from Framingham, who stakes out a rooftop position, was not real but was meant to represent the gung-ho spirit that brought all that firepower to the scene.

INTERROGATION The movie all but indicts Ms. Russell as a knowing accomplice, an insinuation that her lawyer has sharply disputed. But she was never charged. Did the moviemakers know something law enforcement didn’t? “It’s just very hard to understand how a woman living in that small house could not know what was happening,” Mr. Berg said. He said he researched her role extensively and that the F.B.I. vetted the scene in which she refused to cooperate with an interrogator who asked if there were more bombs.

Ms. Russell’s lawyer, Amato A. DeLuca, told me: “If they had information that she was involved, they would have charged her, but they didn’t. And she cooperated every single time.” And while investigators did find “explosive residue from the bombs” at the Tsarnaev home, the trial never established where the bombs were actually made.

CAMEO At the end, the movie shows a small photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in jail. When this security footage aired during the trial, everyone in court gasped because he thrust out his middle finger to the camera. I asked Mr. Berg why he did not show that dramatic gesture.

“I don’t have any respect for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,” Mr. Berg said. “To allow him to have a moment of defiance doesn’t interest me. He doesn’t deserve that moment.”